PHILADELPHIA — Local kid who made good Bobby Ryan is back to play in the Wells Fargo Center for the first time in three years Tuesday night, as the Flyers host the Ottawa Senators. A native of Cherry Hill, N.J., Ryan will try to not get caught up in the memories.

Like the first time he’d played here in front of family and friends as a member of the Anaheim Ducks in October 2009 ...

“(Chris) Pronger knocked two of my teeth out,” Ryan said. “That was a fun night. Then I had to see him and say hello to him after the game. That was even harder.”

Of course, Ryan is looking forward to Tuesday night, when he says he’ll be playing in front of his parents and just a few dozen or so family and friends.

“When you can have family and friends up in the stands for games it means more to you,” Ryan said. “I don’t spend much time here anymore, a couple of weeks in the summer is about it. But it’s still home, so it’s always nice to come back. Mom and Dad are here and there’s like 40 or 50 other people. A big homecoming again.”

Just like it’s always been, since Ryan grew up with a father who was an avid Flyers fan, and eventually became a friend of former general manager Bob Clarke.

“We had season tickets,” Ryan said. “I was at every game. I remember when they went to the Cup and lost to Detroit. We were at all those games. All the playoff runs ... but the World Cup here (in September 1996) was the game that I really, really remember. That was my first hockey experience that I relate to.”

Team USA’s John LeClair scored late to get a game against Team Canada into overtime. Something that a 9-year-old kid named Bobby Stevenson who excelled in his youth hockey leagues in South Jersey would never forget.

But just more than a year later, the young Ryan’s life would change. So would his name. He now is past telling everyone the reason why.

His parents, Bob Ryan and Melody Stevenson, again live in Cherry Hill. After the younger Ryan got to Ottawa, traded there from Anaheim in July, their son felt the need to get his past out in the open again.

He told the Ottawa media to watch a video on YouTube that explains what the kid had gone through at 10 years old. How his father Bob Stevenson had come home drunk one night, started beating his wife, chased her down a block and continued the assault at a neighbor’s house.

Melody had a fracture of the skull, four broken ribs and a punctured lung. She spent four days in Cooper Medical Center in Camden while police launched charges of attempted murder for Stevenson. But Melody would forgive her husband, and with him out on bail and facing jail time, he packed up and took off. She joined him with their son shortly thereafter.

Young Bobby Ryan wound up playing in various leagues through Canada and finally in El Segundo, Calif., where his name was changed from Stevenson to Ryan, because his father had watched the movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

It took more than two years, but the police finally caught up with the former Bob Stevenson, who now called himself Shane Ryan. He wound up being sentenced to five years for aggravated assault and skipping bail, and when he got out, moved back with his family in Cherry Hill, taking a job at his friend Clarke’s gym.

Clarke, a Flyers senior vice-president, spends most of his time in Florida now, and Bobby Ryan’s father, who legally changed his name to Bob Ryan in 2010 (got that?) now runs the gym.

How life can come full circle with so many weird obstacles is what has marked young Ryan’s life. But he did not allow the past to define him as a person.

“I didn’t feel like I really had an identity,” Ryan said in a mass interview at the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. “I knew I had to tell my story.”

The story is old now. The way Ryan, now 26, has handled it in the media, openly telling the story over and over again, has enabled him to thrive in the NHL on his own. He scored 30 or more goals four times in Anaheim, but wasn’t happy when the Ducks threw his name out for trade speculation. During the lockout in 2012, that led Ryan to almost campaigning for a trade to the Flyers. Instead, after a so-so final season with the Ducks, he was traded to Ottawa.

“It’s been awesome,” Ryan said. “You never know what the transition’s going to be like, I guess, when you leave a team in the West to go to one in the East. Culture shock, a little bit, going from Anaheim to Ottawa. But it’s been easy. The organization’s been great.”

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Ryan knows this Senators team is a young one “in transition,” but he’s not very happy with the way the club has been going of late. That includes a 5-0 loss to the Flyers last week.

“We’ve got to start playing more like a desperate team,” Ryan said. “We haven’t done that early enough in games when we found ourselves behind one, two or three (goals). For us, after losing last game at home 5-nothing (to the Flyers) and the way we lost that game, I think our approach will be that we have to match their intensity. We have to make sure we get pucks deep and a lot in the last game they were getting goals off the transition because we got away from our staple, which is putting the puck in deep and going to work. So that has to be our mindset tonight.”

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The Florida Panthers are dedicating their press box to their first head coach, the late Roger Neilson, Monday at noon. The Flyers, who were coached by Neilson in his last head coaching duties before acquiring multiple myeloma, will be on hand. Said Craig Berube, who in his second stint with the Flyers played for Neilson in 1999-2000: “I really loved playing for him. I really did. I was an older guy but he was the kind of coach you’d want to play for and for a long time. Roger’s a professional coach. He didn’t talk to his players a whole lot but he knew exactly what was going on and he basically told you what your job was and that was it. You went and did it.”